19 comments

Great post, as always, Dave. My late wife was Kyrgyz, a tiny Central Asian country, next to the North-Western corner of China. People always assumed, because she was Asian, that she’d be a submissive, ‘Thai-bride’ type. Until they got on the wrong side of her tongue. Because Kygyzstan was part of the USSR until its breakup. So the official language was Russian. And as Kev will testify, Russian swearing (called ‘mat’) is the filthiest, most inventive cursing on the planet. It even used to be illegal to use it in public. So people who thought they were dealing with a submissive Asian discovered they were dealing with a tough Russian. It’s not about who you think people are, it’s about who they really are.

I salute Gordon – one Brit against 4 Yanks. I think it’s great when a person’s fighting spirit goes beyond the agency to the real world.
Too often, in the name of being Political Correct, folks are afraid to stand up for what’s right. The logic being ’2 wrongs don’t make a right’.

Robin,
I think the clever thing was that Gordon instinctively understood context.
It might start off as one bloke against four.
But what Gordon did by repeating the insult very loudly was quickly change the context.
Once everyone could hear it became four blokes against a pub full of people.
Very different scenario.

Dave, I am not from the South, but I live in the South, and it never ceases to amaze me how embarrassing some Southerners can and continue to be (although ignorance and racism are certainly not limited to the South). So on behalf of my more enlightened fellow Americans, allow me to apologize to everyone that was in that pub that day.

Rob,
Every country has people like that and the UK has more than its fair share.
I often get embarrassed by the way some of my countrymen (and women) behave abroad.
Intelligent people everywhere, hopefully, know better than to judge anyone by anything but their own individual behaviour.
Otherwise we’d be as bigoted as the people we despise.

Growing up all of my English pop-culture references were white people. When I spent time in England as a student, the first time I met a black person my brain temporarily short circuited because what I saw and what I heard didn’t match my environment at home. Once my brain caught up after a few seconds I thought to myself, “What exactly were you expecting? He’s from England, why would he sound otherwise?” Lesson learned.

The best part was one of my fellow American students was black and he was just as surprised by the accent as I was, in fact even more so. It really knocked him for a loop. We then got into a discussion about how there can be a divide in the States between how white people and black people speak. That may or may not exist in England, but to our untrained ears (I’ve gotten better about assigning regions to language) it all sounded like an “English” accent. It wasn’t “he sounds white” or “He sounds black”, it was more, “He sounds like he’s from Manchester” or “I think he said Sussex, but I couldn’t understand a bloody word he was saying.”

Very funny, the part about accents Mark.
I felt the same the first time I went to America, but about old people.
Everyone I’d heard speaking American was hip and young: James Dean, Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley.
Then I heard an old person with an American accent and it just sounded wrong.
Old people were supposed to speak with English accents not American.
I couldn’t make out why that old person was trying to sound like a teenager.

Great post Dave. It’s the second time I’ve been motivated to comment on your blog because it really hit a nerve. I’ve encountered racism myself and very recently at work (I work in advertising and I’m mixed race.) On this occasion I chose to ignore it. Not out of any sense of fear that it wouldn’t be dealt with but because I’ve learnt when and how to deal best with such situations.

Anyway to my point. Why have you put it on this blog? This needs to go on your other one.

Jonathan and Lee,
It’s a good point that you think it belongs on the other blog.
I just thought the word ‘nigger’ is very offensive to some people, understandably so.
So rather than risk upsetting anyone at the office, or our clients, I put it here.
But I do take your point.

I understand your concern over the “n” word. I suppose you could do the tabloid thing and put n*gger but that seems to me to trivialise the offence that people rightly take. Whilst I agree with Lee that context is all, on reflection I think that some people might take an absolutist stance and simply find the word unacceptable under any circumstances. In this case, with all the history and baggage hanging on it, it must be right to respect that point of view.

In Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens wrote movingly of a black New York cab driver who had been posted to England in the war and, for the first time, had been treated as an equal by his fellow man. Maybe we are too isolated from the pain behind that word in England.

Joanathan, when Miles Davis first came over to Europe, he couldn’t believe that he wasn’t treated like a second-class citizen; rather, that Europeans, particularly the French, admired him and other black jazz musicians as artists. Indeed, quite a few of them decided to stay in Europe, away from NYC’s 52nd St, the home of bebop, simply because of the way they were treated back home.

Tom & Jonathan,
The issue of race v identity is interesting.
We have a friend whose parents came here from Jamaica.
She was born in London and grew up feeling that her identity was black first.
On her first trip abroad she was quite shocked.
She suddenly found that she felt English first and black a long way second.
I think it’s the same with Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Tina Turner, Jay Z.
To us they are American first and black second.

In his autobiography, Miles talks about sitting on the garden wall outside his house, an amazing converted Russian Orthodox 3-storey church on the Upper West Side, worth millions. A white guy came to deliver something, and assumed that Miles was the janitor. Because he was American second, and a long way second, after being black.

At the end of his album, Jack Johnson, about the world’s first black heavyweight champion, a voice says ‘I’m black. They won’t ever let me forget it. I’m black all right, I won’t ever let them forget it.’